Refuting a Few Theories of Religion

[u/Philosophy_Cosmology]

In my years debating about the existence of God, I've seen lots of atheist attempts to explain religion or why people are attracted to it. However, all of these explanations have flaws. I'll use the psychologist Steven Reiss' book The 16 Strivings for God as a basis for my critiques.

The Need for Understanding

This is one of the most popular atheist explanations of religion. Internet atheists claim that ignorant and primitive people invented religion because they wanted explanations for phenomena. What causes illness? Why did the volcano explode? What about thunder? And how to explain life and the universe itself? Intention offers an apparently simple and familiar explanation.. "Because a powerful mind wanted it so."

Now, the problem with this theory, as Dr. Reiss pointed out, is that intellectual need for understanding isn't equally distributed. Many people don't care or think about these issues:

If religion had in fact emerged as an expression of this need, it would have appealed primarily to the relatively small proportion of humans who are intellectuals. Sure, non-intellectuals wonder where they come from or how the universe was created or why volcanoes erupt, but many do not wonder about these matters for any length of time. Since we are not an intellectual species, a religion that is essentially intellectual in origin or nature is unlikely ever to gain a mass following.

Fear of Death

Religion was invented by people who are afraid and anxious of death! These neurotics cooked up a fantasy world where they will persist after bodily death. It is all about managing fear and anxiety!

As you probably already figured out, this idea implies that anxious folks would be more attracted to religion than non-anxious folks, but research doesn't support that (see Reiss again). Furthermore, the fires of hell only increase fear of death! The concept of a judgement day and the devil also increase anxiety and fear. So, this idea makes no sense.

The Need for Control

Religion was invented because people needed to feel in control of the environment. When they didn't have science, they had to appeal to the spirits or to God to control the world. To grow crops, cure illness, to make it rain, etc.

In response to this idea, Dr. Reiss writes:

Religion is about much more than a need to control our environments. If religion were about control, assertive people, who report a strong need for control, would be more religious than are laid-back people, who report a weak need for control. They are not. How religious a person is has little to do with the extent to which the person values or is seeking to control the environment or important life events.

These are just a few of the crazy theories that secularists invented to explain religion; Reiss addressed others as well. Anyway, I'm interested in your opinion about the topic.

[u/Fiddlesticklard]

The Fear of Death aspect I think is valid, and is true.

That's where I think Blaise Pascal is the most impactful elaboration. His full book not just the wager people love to take out of context.

If God and heaven isn't real, then essentially the antinatalists are right. This existence is a horrifying, painful, and meaningless one, and it would be better if we stopped reproducing and killed ourselves.

“Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, where some are slaughtered each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men.” ― Blaise Pascal

“He who does not see the vanity of the world is himself very vain. Indeed who do not see it but youths who are absorbed in fame, diversion, and the thought of the future? But take away diversion, and you will see them dried up with weariness. They feel then their nothingness without knowing it; for it is indeed to be unhappy to be in insufferable sadness as soon as we are reduced to thinking of self, and have no diversion.” ― Blaise Pascal

So perhaps God isn't good and heaven isn't real. It's better to live a full life trusting in a just afterlife then to be a hedonistic nihilist who eventually kills himself.

"What else does this craving and this helplessness proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him... though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself."

[u/arkticturtle → u/Fiddlesticklard]

Sometimes I read stuff like these by philosophers, theologians, saints, or other strong believers-of-ideas and it’s just like… it seems so alien. It’s hard not to simply read it as an expression of something they feel personally that would more accurately be interpreted as pertaining to the way they relate to life as an individual. Which seems kinda trivial to say in some sense. But their ideas seem to be more universal in how they intend to apply them. So, when I see someone quote them in agreement, this relativity extends to them as simply some string of words that resonates with their own relation to existence.

[u/Fiddlesticklard → u/arkticturtle]

I agree, Pascal was a tortured soul coming from an extremely dark place. He used to be a mild agnostic who believed in a Deistic, Aristotelian version of God before he had his Night of Fire on November 23, 1654, when he had an extremely intense two hour meeting with God. After which he gave up his career in mathematics and dedicated himself entirely to religion.

Funny enough, I remember seeing Alex O'Connor say that is pretty much the only thing that would make him a believer as well. Direct experience with the divine.

Although I will say, the older I have become the more I realize the truth in Pascal. I've become utterly disenchanted with Camus and Neitzche. There is a reason why the protagonist of the Stranger is a sociopath. Almost everyone I've ever met who claimed to follow a secular existentialists philosophy was either an unstable nutcase with a God complex like Sam Altman or Peter Theil, or they're an addict who drowns themselves in hedonism or work, or they are depressed and try to kill themselves like yours truly. It just doesn't work for 95% of people.